Replacing an on-premise contact center application with the cloud version under high time pressure? The holiday home chain Roompot succeeded. Remarkable: the project was managed online from start to finish.

Roompot is a well-known and large provider of holiday parks in Europe. There are more than 2.100 employees who ensure that around 13 million overnight stays go smoothly every year. An important role is reserved for the guest service department, approximately 60 FTE strong. That department has to process just under a million contacts in a normal year, but corona time generated a lot of traffic.

Remko Smith, Head of Guest Service at Roompot, explains that the corona pandemic has had a huge impact on the operation. Particularly in the beginning, the unpredictability played a major role: “On Monday we prepared for what would be announced on Tuesday, in order to implement it on Wednesday, with the prospect that it could change again on Friday.”

From ACD to hunt group

The guest service was therefore flooded for a long time and Roompot had to make working from home possible in that cauldron. The existing infrastructure offered insufficient possibilities for this, so Roompot took a drastic measure by working with hunt groups instead of the ACD. Routing, measuring and management was abandoned and the focus was on getting rid of large volumes by a large group of employees. Only a year later, in which management changes also played a role, did the organization opt for a cloud solution.

Challenge: Migrate in 1 month

Various options were considered and a migration to Genesys Cloud was chosen. This would not only make Roompot ready for hybrid working, but also facilitate the integration options with Salesforce and WFM solution Injixo. The moment when the choice for Genesys Cloud was made was just before the summer peak. Frontline Solutions was asked if it would be feasible to migrate within a month and the system integrator accepted the challenge despite a number of complicating factors.
The migration obviously affects more than technology alone: ​​Roompot's call flows and other processes were also redesigned in a very short time. A redundant infrastructure in the form of two physically separate data centers was chosen.

Agents more productive

After accepting the new environment, Smit now sees various advantages of the previously devised innovations. “It was decided to work with different priorities in the routing for different Roompot labels, in combination with skill-based routing and reviewing training courses for different skills. The result is that we can now put a new employee on the line after four days of targeted training by primarily routing new bookings to this employee – which, given the volume, contributes significantly to production. Previously, a new employee was only put in line after eleven training days. The question is what is left of an agent's absorption capacity after a week of training.”

Reading tip: customer contact training and the forgetting curve of Ebbinghaus

Improved accessibility

Accessibility has also improved significantly. On the day of the migration, Smit saw the waiting time drop by three-quarters to a few minutes at the most. “We are now also better informing callers about any waiting time. It's still not good enough, but it's much better than 40 minutes in crisis. In any case, we are now much better prepared for and resistant to a crisis scenario such as around corona.” (Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

There is one about the collaboration between Roompot and Frontline Solutions customer case available, which you can read or download here.

Interesting article? Share it!